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<table width="100%" summary="page for CRANpackages"><tr><td>CRANpackages</td><td style="text-align: right;">R Documentation</td></tr></table>

<h2> Growth of CRAN </h2>

<h3>Description</h3>

<p>Data casually collected on the number of 
packages on the Comprehensive R Archive 
Network (CRAN) at different dates.
</p>
<p>NOTE:  This could change in the future.  
See Details below.  
</p>


<h3>Usage</h3>

<pre>
data(CRANpackages)
</pre>


<h3>Format</h3>

<p>A <code>data.frame</code> containing:
</p>

<dl>
<dt>Version</dt><dd>
<p>an ordered factor of the R version 
number primarily in use at the time.  
This was taken from archives of the 
major releases at
<a href="https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-1-3-patches/tests/internet.Rout.save">https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-1-3-patches/tests/internet.Rout.save</a>,
...
<a href="https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-3-1-branch/tests/internet.Rout.save">https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-3-1-branch/tests/internet.Rout.save</a>
</p>
</dd>
<dt>Date</dt><dd>
<p>an object of class <code>Date</code> giving 
the date on which the count of the 
number of CRAN packages was determined.
</p>
</dd>
<dt>Packages</dt><dd>
<p>an integer number of packages on the 
CRAN mirror checked on the indicated 
<code>Date</code>.
</p>
</dd>
<dt>Source</dt><dd>
<p>A factor giving the source (person) who 
collected the data.
</p>
</dd>
</dl>



<h3>Details</h3>

<p>This seems to provide the most widely 
available source for data on the growth of 
CRAN, manually recorded by John Fox and 
Spencer Graves.  For a discussion of these 
and related data, see Fox (2009).
</p>
<p>For more detail, see the 
<a href="https://github.com/hadley/cran-packages">CRAN packages</a>   data on GitHub maintained by Hadley Wickham.  
This contains the description file of every 
package uploaded to CRAN prior to the date of 
Hadley's most recent update.  The current 
maintainer of the <code>Ecdat</code> and <code>Ecfun</code> 
packages would consider contributions along the 
following lines:  
</p>
<p>1.  It might be nice to have a more complete 
dataset or datasets showing CRAN growth.  
This might include code fitting multiple models 
and predicting future growth with error bounds 
computed using Bayesian Model Averaging.  These 
model fits might make an interesting addition to 
the examples in this help file.  With a little 
more effort, it might make an interesting note 
for <em>R Journal</em>.  Functions written to fit 
those models might be added to the <code>Ecfun</code> 
package.  
</p>
<p>2.  It might be nice to have a function in 
<code>Ecfun</code> to download the 
<a href="https://github.com/hadley/cran-packages">CRAN packages</a>
data from GitHub and convert it to a format suitable for 
updating this dataset.  
</p>
<p>The current maintainer for <code>Ecdat</code> and <code>Ecfun</code> 
(Spencer Graves) might be willing to accept code and 
documentation for this but is not ready to do it himself at 
the present time.  
</p>


<h3>Source</h3>

<p>John Fox, &quot;Aspects of the Social Organization and Trajectory of the R
Project&quot;, <em>R Journal</em>, 1(2), Dec. 2009, 5-13.
<a href="https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2009-2/RJournal_2009-2_Fox.pdf">https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2009-2/RJournal_2009-2_Fox.pdf</a>,
accessed 2014-04-13.
</p>


<h3>Examples</h3>

<pre>
plot(Packages~Date, CRANpackages, log='y')
# almost exponential growth
</pre>


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